LIDA Seminar Series 8th March 2018

The Leeds Institute for Data Analytics is pleased to present the next seminar in our series showcasing data analytics.

Causal diagrams or directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) can be useful to aid causal interpretation of observational data, but sensibly applying DAGs in practice can be very challenging. This talk will cover (1) how we can test whether a DAG is mis-specified or inconsistent with a dataset; (2) how we can deal with the issue of statistical equivalence between DAGs; and (3) how we can perform DAG-based sensitivity analyses.

Our keynote speaker for this seminar is Johannes Textor (Radboud University Medical Center, Nijmegen, The Netherlands & Visiting Associate Professor, LIDA, University of Leeds). Johannes holds a PhD (2011) in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of Luebeck, Germany. After working in Theoretical Biology group at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, as a postdoctoral fellow, he became an assistant professor at Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 2015, where he leads a research group on computational immunology. Johannes created the software "dagitty.net", an interactive program to build and analyse causal diagrams, that has since been adopted by both instructors and researchers worldwide. In 2016, he released an R package of the same name that was released together with and is used in the textbook "Causality in Statistics: A Primer” by Judea Pearl, Maria Glymour and Nicholas Jewell. His research on the algorithmic aspects of causality has won a young investigator's award from the German Society of Epidemiology in 2012, and an IBM-sponsored award at the Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence conference in 2014. In 2017, he received a grant from the Dutch Cancer Research Foundation to strengthen causal inference in the field of cancer immunotherapy

We also have talks from Sarah Gadd and Kellyn Arnold (PhD students, LIDA- jointly across School of Medicine & Geography).

Agenda

15:30-15:50: Sarah Gadd – Longitudinal data: a review of analysis methods

15:45-16:00: Kellyn Arnold- Causal inference in complex systems

16:00-17:00: Johannes Textor- DAGs for Causal Inference

17:00-18:00: Networking reception in the LIDA Staff Room with drinks and nibbles

This event is free and open to all but booking is required.

If you’d like to attend please contact Hayley Irving with your name, occupation and faculty/organisation.